How to both hide stories from the Kansan board but still use Epics as swim lanes.

Question

We use epics, stories, and sub-tasks and a Kansan board with to-do/in-progress/done.

We use our board to track status primarily with the sub-tasks. We need the parent stories to be in progress rather than just sitting in the backlog so they'll reflect "in progress" in the roadmap. However, we don't need the story itself on the board.

We removed stories out of the board filter  -- tried both as:

type != story

and also as:

type = epic or type =sub-task

but when I use these filters, I can no longer organize swim lanes by epic or even quick filter based on an epic.

Quick filters work on other things like assigned, updated date, etc. but won't display anything epic related.

It's like this particular filter negates any use of swim lanes because other swim lane choices won't work either, like by query or assignee.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

Nic Brough -Adaptavist- · Accepted Answer

Sub-tasks are not linked to the Epics, their link is indirect - you need to look at their parent to establish which Epic that is in.

Bill Sheboy · Accepted Answer

Hi @[deleted] -- Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Nic explained why you cannot use epic swimlanes without the stories to connect the sub-tasks to the grand-parent (epic) on a Jira board.

And, I wondered: if your team believes that you do not need the stories on the board, perhaps your team could work with fewer work-item levels.  That is...

* For many teams, epics often reflect larger bodies of work, with multiple releasable parts,
* Stories are often individually releasable / valuable pieces of those epics, and
* Sub-tasks are often detailed work, not individually releasable.

If the story level is just "noise" for your team using epics and sub-tasks, perhaps you could instead skip epics, and just use stories and sub-tasks.  Then you could have swimlanes by stories and show the sub-tasks on the board.

Best regards,

Bill